Chapter 3. Prerequisites

WACS is primarily designed to work with the Apache 2 web server as this is the industry leading web server for Linux and Unix platforms. It's also available for the Mac OSX platform from various sources, and even for Microsoft Windows under the name WAMP Server. While other web servers may work fine, we would not recommend using them at this time and stage of WACS development. The RPM/DEB packages automatically drop in configuration file snippits to ensure correct operation of apache 2 on Linux releases with supported packages.

	Warning
	There are also important differences in the way that access control is configured between the older apache 2.2 release versions, and the newer apache 2.4 and greater versions. WACS includes code to support both versions and the correct version should be selected by the package during installation.

If you are using a web site hosting provider, most will be using Linux for their standard service and will be using a suitable version of Apache. Most will confirm this in their detailed features card before sign-up - if not, you can always ask their pre-sales support contacts. Do be aware that there are some limitations on using WACS on a web site hosting provider and the installation currently requires some manual intervention and editing. The use of the alternative database based user authentication method in WACS is much more suitable for using on a web site hosting provider than the host based authentication used by default in the standard packages.